Posted
by
timothyon Sunday August 14, 2011 @06:31PM
from the models-in-collision dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The United Nations' most recent global climate report 'fails to capture trends in Arctic sea-ice thinning and drift, and in some cases substantially underestimates these trends,' says a new research from MIT. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report, released in 2007, forecasts an ice-free Arctic summer by the year 2100. However, the Arctic sea ice may be thinning four times faster than predicted, according to Pierre Rampal and his research team of MIT's Department of Earth, Atmosphere, and Planetary Sciences (EAPS)."

The anti-Global Warming people will ignore it. The details don't matter, the truth doesn't matter, and if there's the slightest mistake, error, or just plain poorly worded statement, they'll treat it as proof of a conspiracy dedicated to driving man back to the Stone ages, except with less Jesus and more abortions.

The anti-Global Warming people will ignore it. The details don't matter, the truth doesn't matter, and if there's the slightest mistake, error, or just plain poorly worded statement, they'll treat it as proof of a conspiracy dedicated to driving man back to the Stone ages, except with less Jesus and more abortions.

And trolls will trot out some generic stereotype strawman, then post as Anonymous Coward./irony noted

There can be no doubt about the science, when so many experts agree. What's the point anyway in their childish insistence that predictions must be accurate. After all, this is a complex system those scientists are dealing with. I mean, hell, we don't even really understand how the ice ages came about or what exactly happened to the Sahara in the last couple of thousand years. We don't even know what the weather will be like next Sunday.

You can't really expect those scientists to get everything exactly right the first time, they are scientists, they can't do miracles. And besides, science is changing all the time - it's nothing unusual.

That *is* the accurate translation of the scientific statement into politics, and the political agenda that governments are basing things on. In other words, people with an agenda who want to drive you into the dirt.

The political agenda that cites science of climate change does not have an agenda of driving you into the dirt. The political agenda is to stop polluters from driving us into the dirt.

The political agenda that attacks climate change science is the one that forces the original science to report only the most optimistic projections, based on only the most undeniable evidence. When new science shows that there's a higher probability of a worse projection, that does indeed underm

The political agenda that cites science of climate change does not have an agenda of driving you into the dirt. The political agenda is to stop polluters from driving us into the dirt.

This is quite true. It's very hard to determine intent. They could intend to "you into the dirt" or it might just be a convenient, evolutionary-like outcome of their behaviors. That's why I look at outcome not intent.

Energy isn't everything. Unless you're completely idiotic you must realize that everything that consumes energy requires resources to construct of which we have a finite amount. Regardless of how much energy is contained in the sun the fact is that we cannot tap into it at this point in time, nor in the foreseeable future. We can't even reliably tap into the over abundant energy from the sun that falls on the earth.

The western way of living requires taking resources from other countries. Grow up, you ar

Nuclear energy has never been produced at market price anywhere in the world. Development has been done nearly exclusively in government labs or based on government subsidies. No nuclear plant can get sufficient insurance to cover accidents on the free marktet. Governments guarantee nuclear waste disposal at subsidised prices.

And I'm sure looking forward to a world where Nigeria, Belize, Tuvalu, and Iran produce their power from nuclear plants...

No. The cost of nuclear would be cheaper, if there was less nimbyism. Less rabid environmentalism, especially from the haydays of the 60's and 70's. The maintence costs are smaller on modern reactors. Decommissioned and rebuilt reactors take a fraction of the time when you're not using 50 year old technology. It does scale, and scales well.

Perhaps you could grow up, and realize that the power generation capabilities are right in front of you. And other parts of the world don't have the fear of the 'nu

When was the last time you actually researched the subject? It looks like you are basing your argument on feelings and misinformation. The modern Thorium / molten salt reactors are extremely safe, efficient and clean; actually the cleanest possible method to produce energy en masse. The remaining waste needs to be stored for only a few hundred years, and there is enough thorium to power the entire earth for many generations to come.

Would you argue that building wind mills is a more sustainable solution? The

But these complete dingbats who keep trying to label us alarmists and have to liken science to a region because they have no clue as to the science involved are drowning the voice of reason out with pointless, inaccurate and completely idiotic rants.

You dont understand the science behind it, you dont want to understand it or the arguments recommending what we should do, you just want to whine because you don't understand it.

So leave this discussion to people who have a clue and go back to listening to Fox News, the comforting blanket of ignorance.--Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.

It's getting to the point where Fox News deserves its own corollary of Goodwin's law ; OBTW your sig doesn't seem to match your comment.

You aren't. Go ahead and do it right now. Post that Nuclear is the answer and that they should quite bitching and arguing over ice sheets and just build out nuclear. Then YOUR problem goes away and MY problems goes away and we are all happy campers. I expet that will stick in your craw and you won't be able to do it without all kinds of Ifs and Buts.

"The fact you think Al Gore has anything to do with actual science"

The fact that you don't understand that Al Gore is major driver of the political com

It seems you're getting your info on environmentalists from Fox News stereotypes rather than the real world. Most intelligent environmentalists (the type you're likely to run into on Slashdot) DO advocate for nuclear power, and none want to turn the world communist or have us live in caves.

We do know that it's melting, and the only explanation that has any evidence to support it is that it's due to excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. I think it makes sense to reduce carbon dioxide emissions now.

To make an analogy, a business may go bankrupt in one year or four years. Do they not have any clue what to do, or is it clear that they need to cut costs or increase revenues to stay in business? In life, we can't wait until we have perfect information before we act, otherwise we'd never act.

As is typical for climate change deniers, you have left out a key factor in your "the climate is always changing" screed.
The correlation between atmospheric CO2 levels and warmer climates is well established. And there is reason to debate which is the cause and which is the effect. What you have so conveniently omitted from your argument however, is that, as near as we can tell the level of CO2 has never risen as quickly as it has for the last few decades. Not even close. Given that empirical evidence and

Actually it is suspected to have increased at similar rates before (as a result of cataclysmic volcanic activity messing up the permafrost ), and when it happened last time the majority of species alive on earth went extinct. Not the kinda thing you want to cause to happen if you can avoid it...

Actually it is suspected to have increased at similar rates before (as a result of cataclysmic volcanic activity messing up the permafrost ), and when it happened last time the majority of species alive on earth went extinct. Not the kinda thing you want to cause to happen if you can avoid it...

Read up. The last major extinction event was the end of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. There has been a major global warming event [wikipedia.org], but it didn't cause a mass extinction except apparently among certain sea floor fauna.

How about the correlation between pirates and global temperature. [wikipedia.org] It looks like this chart needs to be updated to show the recent increase in pirates and the contested decrease in temperatures.

We have more than a mere correlation between carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and temperature rise. We have a mechanism of causation: carbon dioxide is conclusively known to be a greenhouse gas. So, yes, burning fossil fuels absolutely does increase global temperature. Of that, there's no doubt at all. The only question is how much. A few climatologists argue that it's not enough to worry about, but the vast majority conclude that the climate sensitivity [wikipedia.org] is above 1.5 degrees Celsius, which is enough that it makes economic sense to reduce carbon dioxide emissions now.

No actually that is all you have. There's plenty of historical evidence to indicate that temperature rise leads the atmospheric CO2 increase. The mechanism by which CO2 is theorised to retain heat is poorly understood and far from proven. Water vapour has a far higher heat capacity to act as a greenhouse gas and yet isn't accounted for in most of the models.

The mechanism by which CO2 is theorised to retain heat is poorly understood and far from proven.

It's actually very well-understood. Arrhenius figured it out ages ago. The details in situ turn out to be moderately more complicated, but no intractable.

Water vapour has a far higher heat capacity to act as a greenhouse gas and yet isn't accounted for in most of the models,

I suspect talking science at you is like talking to a wall, but it's not heat capacity. Heat capacity is a different thing. Water vapor is a stronger greenhouse gas, It's also accounted for in most of the models, funny that. The reason it's not as significant a factor is that it's difficult to actually change the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere (overall).

It's hard to directly change the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere, because it just precipitates out. We call it rain. On the other hand, if you pump billions of tons of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere every year, we increase the temperature of the ocean and atmosphere, which causes more evaporation. This leads to higher humidity and more precipitation, and of course, the extra water vapor causes yet more warming. This is why we say water vapor is a feedback, not a forcing. So, yes, water vapor

So it's just an amazing coincidence that we'll have ice-free summers in the Arctic 200 years after we started burning fossil fuels en masse?

We have excellent "undeniable [reuters.com]" evidence of global warming. We have over 100 years of climatology that tell us that the carbon sensitivity is probably between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees Celsius, starting with Arrhenius [wikipedia.org] and continuing to the latest estimations [wikipedia.org]. We have agreed that we want to keep the global temperature rise under 2 degrees Celsius [wikipedia.org]. The only way we can achieve this goal is to begin reducing carbon dioxide emissions immediately, given the information we presently have. To me, that says "Act now!"

So it's just an amazing coincidence that we'll have ice-free summers in the Arctic 200 years after we started burning fossil fuels en masse?

Could be. After all, coincidences still happen even in today's world. And that's part of my point. You don't want to set global policy based on coincidences.

We have over 100 years of climatology that tell us that the carbon sensitivity is probably between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees Celsius, starting with Arrhenius and continuing to the latest estimations.

And this may well be right.

We have agreed that we want to keep the global temperature rise under 2 degrees Celsius.

No, "we" haven't. For example, I'm not a signatory to the Treaty of Copenhagen, nor did I vote for Obama who did sign the treaty, and it's worth noting that his signature has no weight since the treaty was not ratified by US Congress. So not only do we have a random slashdot poster who hasn't bought in to the above, we have wh

The planet HAD been cooling since the early Holocene (climatic optimum). It's only over the past 100 years that this cooling has reversed, and pretty dramatically. So no, the arctic not been beating a retreat whole time, and certainly not at the pace we've seen recently.

Or whatever causes climate shifts when human activity wasn't around to be blamed.

That would be CO2, methane, and other green-house gases. Primarily CO2 though as it has a long atmospheric half-life and has a tendency to saturate the biggest sink for it (the oceans) pretty quickly.

We can't have perfect information, but we can have better. It's an obvious strategy to wait till we have better information. There is a real choice here.

In this case, even that much won't happen. It's sea ice, melting won't affect the ocean levels one bit. Floating objects displace water equal to the volume of an equivalent weight of water. Since the ice is water, when it melts the net displacement won't go up. The effects of global warming may be bad, but this will not cause flooding.

Unbearable my ass. We have had over 50 days of temps over 100 degrees here in TX. Everyone is doing just fine. We broke two records!...but they were set in the 20s...whoops. It's taken us almost 100 years to get back to where we were in the 20s.

Hiding out all day in the air conditioning != "just fine". Ask the farmers and ranchers in TX if they are doing just fine. The municipal water supplies for some Hill Country cities (Llano, etc.) are already dried up or soon will be. Another summer like this one with no winter rains again and Lake Travis dries up and then no one in Central TX will be doing fine.

Only 2% of all the ice on the world actually floats. The rest is supported by land, and will cause sea level rise when it melts. Yes, this article only talks about the Arctic ice, but the rest isn't immune to rising temperatures.

Even though the waves from the tsunami following the recent 9.0 Japan earthquake were not very large when hitting Antarctica, about 50 square miles of ice broke off.Some of the many factors are not linear, so a simple loss multiplier or even one based on monotonically increasing loss will have limited accuracy. That's no excuse for denial, as what's happening is quite clear.

Trends and quantitative coefficients are not the same thing. In this case the trend matters for policy makers, the coefficients do too, but not nearly so much.

Drunk driving is bad. Since we haven't precisely quantized how exactly every single persons ability decay with blood alcohol limit do we just let people drive drunk, or just go with a best guess of 0.05 or 0.08 and iterate? Even if we have the quantized result, say on warming or drunk driving or anything else that doesn't really tell us what policy should be unless you want to say it should be 0. What should humanities contribution to global warming be? If we say '0', basically you're asking to kill 6 billion people, destroy every factory, car, power plant ever produced and go back to an 80% mortality rate before we're 5 years old. That's probably not a great goal. I suppose it means no abortions, but I don't think even religious nutters would be willing to take that tradeoff. For drunk driving you accept a certain degree of impairment as so minimal as to not really be important, though if we drove cars that went 1000Km/h we'd have a different tolerance level. For global warming we have to accept some amount of warming, because there has already been some, and we're not, in any reasonable time frame going to correct that. So the question is 'how much worse do we let it get, and, on a best guess, how much is it going to cost us'? To with that we wonder 'at what point can we not do any more'? With the ozone layer 160 of the 200 or so countries in the world banned the most serious damaging chemicals about 15 years ago. So there is still damage to the ozone layer happening, and it is likely that it won't be completely repaired until well into the 22nd century. We've certainly taken, in that case, the largest most relevant steps, and we'll be another decade or two before we really know if it was enough, or if we need to do more, but at least we've stopped the, majority of the ongoing damage.

Global warming is a tricky problem, it's not really an individual problem, so we can't mandate individual responsibility for it, it doesn't manifest itself equally everywhere, and if someone else doesn't do there part, the people who do are forced to do more. None of these make for good policy problems, especially when dealing with the americans. The kyoto protocols aim for a CO2 reduction from 1990 levels are basically arbitrary, it's a starting point of a policy, not a quantified analysis of what's required. Because there is no scientific requirement, it's a matter of what cost/benefit we are willing to trade. But it's also a collective, shared responsibility, one that isn't going to be borne equally. Poor countries are poor for a lot of reasons, but the rest of us got rich polluting the planet, and now we're saying they can't become rich unless the do it a different way, that's not fair to them, but it's not fair to the rich world to demand we make all the cuts and poor countries can pollute like crazy negating anything we do.

Either way. Being off on the the exact value of a coefficient is not all that important to the policy problem. We're not doing enough. It's a matter of degree of how much we're not doing. The only thing to do is to try and minimize further warming, and iterate as time goes on.

Since this is a tech board, I'll put it in CS terms. We, in CS, regularly analyze algorithms in 'big O' notation, n^2, n^3 etc. It's a rare, specialized skill to put actual coefficients in front of each term, and most of the time, big O notation gets the job done (and if you really need them it's easier to measure them than calculate them). Policy based around science is mostly worried about the big O notation, because once we start changing policies, whether thats about the ozone layer, sulfur in the air, greenhouse gases or whatever, all the previous detailed assessments get thrown out, and you start looking for the new trend.

We don't want to base world economic policy on "it's not doing any harm lets keep going" when i

We don't want to base world economic policy on "it's not doing any harm lets keep going" when it's clearly doing harm, it's a matter of degree.

How about "It's doing less harm than the fix would do. Let's keep going." Does that work for you?

Global warming is a tricky problem, it's not really an individual problem, so we can't mandate individual responsibility for it, it doesn't manifest itself equally everywhere, and if someone else doesn't do there part, the people who do are forced to do more.

So what if some people have to "do more"? Let's keep in mind that the proposed fix, reverting to 1990s levels or less, also forces some people to "do more" than other people. We also need to keep in mind that there's no mechanism in place that can keep those who would suffer under a climate control regime from complying. Currently, the future CO2 producers will be the US and the bigger emerging countries such as China and India. None of them have shown the inclination to damage their economies in order to reduce the effects of global warming. And they all have sufficient power to avoid being forced to accept a climate deal that is detrimental to their interests.

For me the kicker is that I don't see a reason to mitigate global warming effects. Land is not that scarce. People and societies can and do move, particularly on the time scales that global warming acts. For example, there's enough people moving in the US that effectively the entire population moves every six or so years.

Most buildings have a life of around 20-50 years. So any problem that's on a longer time scale mostly will involve real estate that hasn't yet been built.

How about "It's doing less harm than the fix would do. Let's keep going." Does that work for you?

What harm exactly does dumping less shit into the atmosphere do? There are lots of ways to accomplish that, all of which come with their own trade offs of course. Nuclear is well, nuclear, solar and wind have their own complications (mostly about resources and space uses). Burning coal and oil isn't exactly good for the atmosphere. Less CO2 in the atmosphere is good.

The kyoto protocol is not, as you have wrongly referred to it, a 'fix', it is one iterative step, upon which to base more iterative steps. 15% before 1990 levels is both arbitrary and silly. That equates to some actual year (probably 1987 or something), so even the target is phrased in a goofy way. And we can't even do that. Therein lies the problem. The burden on people are going to follow the protocol and make cuts (mostly europeans) is going to be harder, and more to the point if we need to cut X from the atmosphere and only europe is going to cut anything they have to not only cut X, but X+Y, where Y is whetever everyone else is adding to the problem. And yes, no one is obliged to accept anything. International agreements rely on everyone who agrees to actually do it. That's my point of where policy starts to fall apart. Peace treaties require everyone agrees, war requires only one party to agree to it. Such is the way of international agreements. You can try all you want to impose your will on others, and there are non violent ways to accomplish that, but in the end yes, if china doesn't agree to go along with it, either the rest of us cut more to cope, try and impose our will on them (trade sanctions) or we do nothing and cope with the consequences. Of course if no one goes along with it china is unlikely to try and solve this problem on their own, not that they could if they wanted to.

But yes, we must disagree on what to do about it. If you think displacing millions of people, spending hundreds of billions of dollars to keep more people from having to move, seriously disrupting food production around the world and so on are worthwhile tradeoffs so you can keep using coal fired generators rather than uranium, thorium, solar, or wind, then all that remains is disagreement.

Most buildings have life spans several multiples if not orders of magnitude longer than you have suggested. That that may not be good policy, or good for the buildings and people inhabiting them, but your assertion is factually incorrect. Lots of post WW2 housing was not built to last, that's true, but that is a fraction of the total buildings built in the world.

Land is not that scare is an interesting assertion. I certainly disagree with it on two levels. First, not all land is useful. There's lots of empty land in the middle of the sahara, that doesn't help anyone. That goes to the first problem which is that *usable* land is becoming scarce, and moreso if we want to preserve any remnants of natural habitats for other creatures. Secondly, land, overall, in a lot of places *is* scarce, and, importantly, those are the most populated places, and many of them are poor and those people aren't going to be able to move to places with space (least of all places with usable space). Where are we going to move a few hundred million southeast asians, or chinese or japanese? How about europeans? They aren't exactly welcome in africa for example, and the reason the europeans went rampaging around the world is they didn't have enough space for themselves in europe. And there were a lot less people in europe 150 years ago than there are today. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_real_population_density_(based_on_food_growing_capacity) has an illustrative chart. What you are suggesting is sacrificing habitable, food growing areas, to compact people into less space, and hope more of it becomes arable. Not to mention the enormous cost of packing up and moving people and all of the infrastructure t

The kyoto protocol is not, as you have wrongly referred to it, a 'fix', it is one iterative step, upon which to base more iterative steps.

And why I should be impressed by treaties which hinder our activities without actually fixing the problem? There's another solution here even if global warming turns out to be a serious problem. Adaption. That is, go on and adapt to whatever adverse or beneficial changes occur. We can move as a natural background activity the entire human race many times over by the time the effects of global warming are supposed to come. We can build irrigation systems to keep drying areas agriculturally productive. And we

"Drunk driving is bad. Since we haven't precisely quantized how exactly every single persons ability decay with blood alcohol limit do we just let people drive drunk, or just go with a best guess of 0.05 or 0.08 and iterate?"

Well, we set up illegal police search and seizures via drunk driving road blocks, charge and imprison people for refusing to incriminate themselves (by refusing to provide a breath or blood sample) and generally punish people based upon a (unknown and certainly small) potential they ma

hmm, well let's look at this one. It we could be losing it at x rate, or 4x! Translation: we don't have any frapping clue. Yeah, that's what we want to base worldwide economic policy on.

Or maybe you should RTFS a little closer. Four years ago they concluded we were losing it at x rate, and this more recent MIT research claims we're losing it at 4x rate. If you RTFA the researchers say this is because the IPCC looked primarily at temperature change and underestimated the effect mechanical forces such as drift have on thinning.

Look, you can bury your head in the sand all you want, but don't act surprised when some of us take it more seriously that Arctic ice has shrunk by a third in the pa

Greenland is called "Greenland" for the same reason that Iceland is called "Iceland". Public relations, Iceland was relatively nice, at least by Scandinavian standards and they didn't want to be over run and Greenland was a waste land that they were trying to attract people to.

1) It's still called global warming. Always has. The media calls it "climate change", even though properly it's global warming.2) Ozone is O3, which exists as a gas in our atmosphere. A spacecraft can no more "puncture" ozone than you can puncture the air around you with your fists.3) We first started recording global temperature change in the mid-20th century.4) No reputable scientific paper or journal has predicted a "doomsday", the media make those claims.5) CO2 is not the only "greenhouse" gas, or even the most important.6) There is cause for concern, but no cause for "judgment day" or "doomsday".

Some people don't call it "global warming", because idiots like you couldn't stop saying that extreme cold in Winter somehow proved it wrong, even when the overall average of the globe is indeed warming.

You can't spell "holes". And there were, and still are, ozone holes. Only idiots like you said spacecraft "punctured" the atmosphere, though spacecraft exhaust does destroy atmospheric ozone and contributed to the holes. But it was spraycan propellant and coolant CFCs that mainly destro

Every volcano on earth put together releases 1% as much CO2 per year as humans do.

I prefer to believe that you were quoting a source you trusted, rather than deliberately trying to cloud the issue. Now you know something important about that source's trustworthiness. Reason from there to an assessment of that source's motives.

The hole in the ozone layer was attributed to the use of Chloro-Fluoro-Carbons (CFCs) in aerosols. We have stopped using CFCs and the hole has stabilised (which, to me, indicates that there may have been a link) but it is predicted to take till 2050 for it to be repaired. It is an interesting article, please have a read - for you, I especially recommend the misconceptions and consequences parts.

You've misunderstood the IPCCs view on the sun.They understand the Sun to be a major contributor to the climate, but they do understand that the recent warming is NOT due to the Sun for a number of reasons.(1) The Suns output has not increased, yet temperatures increased.(2) The Stratosphere is COOLING. This is important. If the Sun were warming things then the Stratosphere would NOT be cooling. This cooling is predicted to occur due to the physics of CO2 and is being observed.

The ascending force equals the amount of water displaced. Floating ice thus will displace exactly the volume of water corresponding to its weight. And if it melts, it will have exactly the volume of the water displaced, because it's water itself.

But is only part of the picture. liquid water's density also has a small temperature dependence. Warm water is less dense than cold, although a degree or two isn't going to be a significant percentage, it can still add up to noticeable changes in depth when you're talking about a column of water 4 km deep - it only takes a.04% increase in volume to equate to an extra 2 meters in depth...

We obviously won't be able to stop this melting by just reducing emissions. It will be really interesting to see what happens with shipping lanes and military strategy if we can go right over the pole (with boats, instead of just with missiles).

More importantly, even if we CAN stop this ice from melting by cutting emissions, we aren't willing to do what it would take to cut the emissions that much. Most people would rather have a car than a polar bear (and me too, to be honest).

Cutting carbon emissions doesn't mean we can't have cars. It means that cars need to be more energy efficient in the near future and run on energy not derived from fossil fuels in several decades. Reducing carbon dioxide emissions doesn't mean doing without. It seems that most people who don't want to reduce carbon dioxide emissions really just don't want to lower their standard of living. Fortunately, we can reduce carbon dioxide emissions significantly and keep our standard of living.

According to Hansen et al (from the link you gave) "An initial 350 ppm CO2 target may be achievable by phasing out coal use except where CO2 is captured and adopting agricultural and forestry practices that sequester carbon. If the present overshoot of this target CO2 is not brief, there is a possibility of seeding irreversible catastrophic effects." We do have decades to act.

Cutting carbon emissions doesn't mean we can't have cars. It means that cars need to be more energy efficient in the near future and run on energy not derived from fossil fuels in several decades. Reducing carbon dioxide emissions doesn't mean doing without. It seems that most people who don't want to reduce carbon dioxide emissions really just don't want to lower their standard of living. Fortunately, we can reduce carbon dioxide emissions significantly and keep our standard of living.

Not really. Reducing carbon emissions only delays the point where we've burned all the useful carbon in the ground. Since the CO2 will stay in the atmosphere for over 1000 years, it doesn't really make a difference whether we burn all the carbon in 100 years or in 150 years.

If you want to keep CO2 lower, we need to decide to leave some carbon in the ground, and never use it. At the same time, we should probably find a way to sequester existing CO2.

The US military has detailed information on ice sheet thickness going back 50 years but it's mostly classified. The Russians have similar information and I think their excitement recently over exploiting the arctic shows where they think the trend is heading. They aren't looking at a 100 years from now but in the next decade or two. Most of the discussion is over coverage of the ice but the more telling is thickness. As the ice thins a huge part of the arctic could be exposed in a single season from a major

50 years of data sounds like a lot, until you realize it doesn't even go back in time far enough to include the last ice age... It's like extrapolating the stock market's performance for the day by analyzing the previous few minutes of trading.

Yes, an uneducated moron would think the stock market and climate systems are the same. Because only an uneducated moron would compare forecasting an unbounded chaotic system with a bounded quasi-chaotic physical system dictated by a set of physical equations.

To illustrate, we can predict that temperatures in the winter in the northern hemisphere will be cold. You don't even need historical data to show this as a trivial 2D energy balance model can give an decent good approximation. The more details you add

Typical science news "ZOMG our predictions could be wrong, but we need $x million to do more research about if we are right or not". Everything is made into a crisis to get more funding. Just look at all the hyped up illnesses in the past decade, if all those "predictions" were right all of us would be dead with bird flu/swine flu/MERSA/SARs.

Therefore it's absolutely safe to conclude that there can be no possible crises ever.

[/s] SARS, the bird flu, and the swine flu were made into crises by the media, not scientists. If you equate what you hear in the news with science, you've got big problems. As far as MERSA goes, it does seem to be fairly bad. [webmd.com] I don't know if some scientist told you that everyone was going to die in 3 years if they didn't get funded or what, but this anti-science thing you've got going on is stupid.

A pandemic doesn't mean corpses rotting in the streets. You can have a pandemic without a single fatality, if the disease is not fatal. Pandemic [reference.com] just means the disease is spread over a wide area, and does not give any indication of how deadly a disease it. I think the scientifically illiterate public are more to blame for the misunderstanding than scientists or the press. Scientists actually saved thousands of lives by determining that the young were most at risk and quickly developing an effective vaccine

Thank you for summing up the already crystal clear argument there, but it's still confusing the media's sensationalism with science, and it's still fundamentally anti-science crap.

Independent, truly progressive thinkers, can now see this 'crisis' for what it truly is (a wealth redistribution plan, and a power grab)

I'll bite. Who exactly is going to profit here? The uber-powerful renewable energy industry? I've never gotten a straight answer as to who is buying off all these climatologists to get fossil fuels banned and profit from it, it's always "The government" or some crack about Al Gore.

Just look at all the hyped up illnesses in the past decade, if all those "predictions" were right all of us would be dead with bird flu/swine flu/MERSA/SARs.

Can you point to a single reputable scientist who claimed that everyone in the world was going to die from a flu pandemic? I'm not a flu expert, but my personal opinion is that the scientists actually understated the threat of a flu pandemic, whilst the media overstated it. The problem with the media is that they deal in the now, and have very little grasp of reporting long-term threats. Scientists tend to be more cautious and won't make predictions that aren't backed up with numbers.

The 1918 flu pandemic [wikipedia.org] infected 32% of the world's population, and killed 3% of the world's population. As far as I can see, there is absolutely no reason why such a pandemic couldn't be repeated today. And whether it will be more or less deadly is impossible to predict - H5N1 [wikipedia.org] killed 60% of infected humans - a mortality rate far higher than the 1918 flu. If H5N1 was as transmissable as the 1918 flu then over 3 billion people would've been killed. This is a number and a risk far in excess of the danger of terrorism, and yet we will spend literally trillions of dollars "fighting terrorism", whilst we spend only millions seeking flu vaccines.

Given the potential danger from flu, and the fact that the victims would be everyone on the planet, it seems like the per capita risk is several orders of magnitudes higher than terrorism. And yet, all of the funding, and all of the political debate, focuses on terrorism. It's crazy, and people who brush it under the carpet by saying "well, we haven't had another pandemic yet", have entirely missed the point. The fact that the 2009 swine flu outbreak [wikipedia.org] didn't kill millions isn't a reason to believe that the threat does not exist - rather, the fact that the 2009 pandemic turned out to be caused by an entirely unseen new variant of the flu that incorporated genes from 5 different viruses should prove beyond any doubt that flu evolution and mutation does pose a continued threat to humanity.

But instead of heeding this warning, people like you will say "Ahh stupid scientists got it wrong! Everyone didn't die". But in fact 18000 did die, and it is only down to chance that this particular flu variant wasn't more lethal and more widely spread. How many dollars have been spent for each victim of 9/11 fighting the terrorism threat? How many dollars have been spent for each victim of H5N1 fighting the flu threat? For whatever reasons, our society is very bad at assessing risk when it comes to long term threats. We judge everything through the lens of the media, which reports current events news, and anything longer than a decade can be kicked into the long grass in the political world.

The way the headline reads, it looks like MIT is accusing the UN of not taking Arctic ice into account in their global warming calculation, i.e. MIT says there should be less global warming because the UN forgot to calculate a cold thing.

That is the OPPOSITE MESSAGE from what the story actually says. Does slashdot even have editors anymore?

It seems more-or-less to represent the article. If you want a direct quote from the article that kind of conveys the same message, there is this one:

On the other hand, large cracks in winter's ice cover help create new ice, since the extremely cold air in contact with the liquid ocean promotes refreezing.
Because "everything is coupled" in these intricate feedback loops, "it's hard to predict the future of Arctic sea ice," Rampal says.

Apparently, I've forgotten to read between the lines of a scientific paper, because it doesn't sound like much of a polemic.

Here's the discussion.

Discussion and summary:Consistent with AR4, this analysis demonstrates that observed and modeled late 20th century Arctic sea ice loss cannot result from natural variability alone. Indeed, an anthropogenic influence on the most extreme observed 1979-2010 negative trends is now evident for all trend lengths examined (2-54 years). While CCSM4 can reproduce the observed ice loss, it also shows that internal variability exerts a strong influence on sea ice trends, especially on sub-20 year timescales. Comparing a six-member CCSM4 ensemble to observed trends suggests that internal variability has enhanced observed ice loss and facilitated detection of an anthropogenic influence on observed trends during the satellite era (1979-present). In a warming world, multi-decadal negative trends increase in frequency and magnitude, trend variability on 2-10 year timescales increases, and when internal variability counteracts anthropogenic forcing, positive trends frequently occur on 2-20 year timescales in the second half of the 20th century, and on 2-10 year timescales in the first half of the 21st century.

But maybe I've missed something. Read the paper [ucar.edu] and tell me what you think.

We only have data of 32 years. The paper is trying to derive from that basis the natural variability of ice-cover over decades and assigns all the residual variability to non-natural - that is, anthropogenic - factors. They do that by integrating this data into huge simulation runs of up to 4000 years:

Over 4000 years of CCSM4 integrations were used to calculate trends for this study.
Natural trends were derived from a 1300-year long control run with constant 1850 forcing
(1850CNT) and from an 850-year long

It has been known for a while that the 2007 report failed to include the effect of sea ice loss, mainly because there was no reliable data at that time, I think. We aren't going to drown in 10, 20 or 30 years, but sea ice is shrinking and thinning faster than previously expected. Most glaciers are shrinking too.

I think you're pretty confused. The 2007 report failed to include the effect of ice sheet loss on sea level rise. The 2007 IPCC report did include sea ice loss, which has other effects, such as decreasing the albedo of Earth which speeds up warming. One thing in particular sea ice loss doesn't do is raise sea level, because the ice is floating.

Warming a fluid system, such as a planet's atmosphere or water in a pot, results in more, and more vigourous motion. Weather will become more violent.

That fails to explain why there are colder outer planets with significant atmosphere that have orders of magnitutude more violence. And the place on earth with the higest average wind is Antartica.

I guess a heated pot is not a good approximation for a planetary weather system. So - no - I don't really buy the higher temperature = more violence meme. Nor the 'once in a lifetime' crap the media regularly dishes out.

That fails to explain why there are colder outer planets with significant atmosphere that have orders of magnitutude more violence.

Lol wut? The atmospheres of the outer, "colder" planets are quite unlike those of the Earth. A lot of factors can explain the "more violent" weather -- composition, energy, tidal effects from massive satellites, energy output from the planet involved (Jupiter outputs much more energy than it gets from the Sun), effects due to faster rotation, etc -- the outer, "colder" planets' atmospheres are nothing like that of the Earth.

Anyways, yours is a non-argument -- "hotter" and "more violence" in this context are

the right is part of a community, they derive their sustenance and riches from it, but through either blindness or tactically calculated greed, they deny they have to give anything back to continue the money flow. after a few such assholes, the community is withered, and poorer, and everyone makes less money

the riches in your bank account is a direct reflection of the riches of the community you live in. rich community = rich individuals. no one makes money by themselves. on one is an island. no matter how